Month: April 2009

[Colt45] shows us some pictures of his Rovio fire extinguisher mod. Being a fan of model building, he built a new shell for the Rovio and mounted a halon distribution system to the top of it. He says he loaded some custom software for identifying and extinguishing flames, which he’ll upload eventually. We really wish we knew more, or at least had a video of it working. We’re a little bit surprised we haven’t seen more done with these things.

[Justin] sent in his 1st place winning project from Northeastern’s Electrical Engineering Senior Design Capstone. It’s an interface that uses electrostatics to detect your hand position above it. As you can see in the video, it has decent resolution and can detect position on all 3 axes. When they uncover it, you can see the sensors arranged in a grid. They point out that each sensor isn’t just like a button, but rather detects a range of motion. They are using a pic 18×4550 to handle the sensors, which then communicates to the PC via USB. This could be pretty useful for musical performances as well as an alternative interface for people who can’t use a mouse.EO

Here’s a quick demo that FAT’s [Theo Watson] put together. It uses the iPod’s accelerometer to measure how fast it’s spinning and plays the sound file accordingly. This only works on the iPod touch 2nd gen because of its curved case. He says scratching is coming next, but currently the app doesn’t know which direction it’s spinning since it’s measuring outward force. This project was done in response to [vanderlin]’s AR scratching that used fiducials on records.

This art display system was created by [Peter Sand]. It is called Plant Fasting and is comprised of a giant robot with interchangeable tools for various gardening tasks. Though the system is mostly automated, it can be controlled via a game pad. It has an Arduino as its brain and it looks like he’s done a completely custom setup for powering the interchangeable pieces.

In honor of Gameboy’s 20th birthday, Stupidinventions has released a video showing how to replace the screen. They tend to be a common weak point. Essentially, they just bought another , we’re assuming broken, Gameboy and swapped them out. Not a horribly complicated hack, but nice to know that it’s so easy. We have fond memories of the Gameboy, which came flooding back when he blew in the cartridge. Happy Birthday Gameboy.

[Benjamin] was working for a GPS company called Nemerix about two years ago and decided to hack together this iPod accessory GPS unit. He is using an Atmel ATmega324 and a Nemerix GPS unit, though he says the GPS unit shouldn’t matter. He is taking advantage of the AiR mode on the iPod which allows a 4 color image to be sent to the screen. There was little information on how to utilize this, but BMW and Alpine had made some car audio that featured this. [Benjamin] picked up an Alpine with this function and sniffed the data stream to get what he needed. He says there is good documentation out there now though.

Remember the 2 meter POV display? Well, that same group of students are at it again. This is the display they built for parties. It is 5 meters wide and 2.5 meters tall, 240 LEDs, controlled by 40 AVR ATmega48s. This is pretty nice. We think next time they should go for RGB.